Wednesday 16 September 2015

a thirteenth new reflection ... 'corbyn and the media: stop me if you think you've heard this before'

The British media have been nauseating this summer in their treatment of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for Labour leadership, and now in the aftermath of his landslide victory are resorting to desperate, sub-tabloid smear tactics to dirty his name and discredit the newly revitalised and politicised left-leaning element of the UK proletariat. Anyone who has read or knows the premise of Chris Mullin’s political novel A Very British Coup and sided with Harry Perkins should be pissed off, worried or both.

Indeed, the latest attempt en masse to undermine Corbyn’s natural and honest appeal is to scream at him for choosing not to sing the National Anthem at a Battle of Britain memorial service this week. While it is to be expected of The Sun to claim Corbyn’s choice of respectful, contemplative silence over joining in a hymn to an enduring albeit unelected head of state and our warmongering jingoistic past a ‘snub’ to the Queen, what is more concerning is that BBC Radio 4 Today ran this as their headline news story – and what’s more featured a less-than-objective discussion on why Jezza didn’t have his top button done up either; scandal of deceitful type proportions!

Then again, if The Sun and the Great British Broadcasting Castle are to be sided with, PM David Cameron’s tweets about Corbyn should be taken seriously too – JC is a ‘threat to our national security’, to ‘our families’, and if given the chance would hide shrapnel in your breakfast cereal. Indeed Cameron’s Twitter feed of late reads like a series of Daily Mail headlines; we shouldn’t be surprised. But as the Telegraph, the UK’s ‘leading broadsheet’ so eloquently put it yesterday, the new Labour leader has even gone so far as to ‘appoint  a nut job’ as shadow chancellor in mad-as-a-gentleman’s-hat-shop tovarishch, John McDonnell.

However, we all know newspaper circulation is plummeting in the UK, by half a million in the last eighteen months as the Guardian reported in April. And while tabloids and now broadsheets alike resort to attention-grabbing headlines and dim-witted sensationalist journalism, many people are simply not paying serious attention any more.

Simultaneously, the rise of uncensored and untampered with political comment and opinion online – while there are down sides – has provided a forum, a space for clued-up, free and deep-thinking individuals including the likes of Owen Jones and Aaron Bastani (Novara Media) to have their voices heard and to discuss politics with politicians in a manner that allows the latter to finish their sentences; moreover the Twittersphere, where much of this debate is communicated, often favours accuracy and the proliferation of statistics over unruly and simplistic editorial shmuck from those at the behest of Murdoch and Co (ironically, including David Cameron).

Opinion forming is increasingly happening online away and apart from traditional print and broadcast media. Corbyn’s huge mandate this summer can in part be explained by this; so to the realisation of self-determination in Scotland at referendum last year, and most recently it is important to note that the broadly-speaking sympathetic reaction to the refugee crisis did not begin at No.10 Downing Street (which was then barricaded against impending ‘swarms’) or the offices of The Times in Thomas More Square. And, of course, there’s the rising awareness of austerity and related inequalities which has been getting plenty of coverage on the internet as well.

But to return to the Battle of Britain – it was yet another disaster set within the wider unremitting tragedy of the Second World War. The young men and women who gave their lives, and were remembered this week, went to their deaths in the hope of protecting families, loved ones and in the name of freedom. Freedom from a political elite hell-bent on cleansing British (and European) society - if given half a chance; a political elite that also relied heavily on traditional, national print and broadcast media to try and control public opinion (how about that for a loaded paragraph no doubt The Sun would be keen to exploit).

Nevertheless, putting hyperbole firmly aside, when you wake up tomorrow, walk past your local news stand and read that Jeremy Corbyn wants the Royal Air Force grounded or National Treasure Cliff Richard’s gold teeth removed and melted down to create new pound sterling with which to aid quantitative easing, stop and ask yourself if you’ve heard oh so much of this before!

Sunday 13 September 2015

Spares

Sarah smiled as her dearest friend Fi talked cheerily about her husband. Sarah smiled because she knew that now she’d had Hektor the once, the levee had broken, washing up the affair she so desperately wanted. In years to come, she wanted to be able to say, ‘Oh yes, with Hektor I had such a torrential affair. It was gloriously passionate, but could not last. C’est la vie.’
Sarah had moments like this so well mapped out she was certain they would happen, this one probably in a café on the street under a parasol, her seated in a black cast iron chair in her elegant early fifties. Wearing large sunglasses like a starlet.
‘He has been so good with India these last three months, and the other one of course, but India adores him. I swear her eyes get wider when the door goes for him coming in from work, and he’s quite adept with the changed board – you know those things can be a bugger, I’m sure you remember even with Holly coming up four now, if you don’t get their little legs just so – yes, Hektor really is a doting father. I’m so happy it went that way, you do hear of some men being kind of standoffish in the pre-talking, pre-walking phases.’
Fi was prattling on. This was the first time she’d left India (and Mindy) alone with the nanny so she could pop over to Sarah’s for a coffee. Sarah was half-listening, half enjoying observing her own internal advocate taunting Fi, saying, I fucked your husband, that same voice of What If that gave her palpitations when she was on a high bridge or somesuch and it said What If you just suddenly lose control of yourself and spring athletically over the railings to your certain death? Or more ominously, when she was with Rico, the voice said What If you developed superstrength and lost control and threw your husband over the edge? Sarah listened to it with quiet amusement, tasting the feeling of devilishness and relishing it, and it must have shown, as Fi asked:
‘Why are you grinning at me?’
‘I’m so glad it worked out for you two. After the third round failed …’
‘Well, we can’t all be as fecund as you and the heffe, unfortunately.’ Fi didn’t sound jealous, in spite of the plosive wording, and Sarah wouldn’t expect her to be; Fi was pathologically incapable of negative thoughts.
‘True. The MZ twin induction injections are no picnic, let me tell you,’ said Sarah. ‘At least you were spared that.’
‘Of course, sorry, I didn’t mean …’ Fi also had a pathological fear of offending people. She changed the subject. ‘Have you been watching ‘Father of the Year’?’
‘Yes, Rico loves it. He’s a wonderful armchair father.’
‘I’ve been voting for Daniel from the start. He’s through to the last eight. Did you see him in the Fitness Boss round? He was quite handsome actually,’ Fi admitted, hand coming to mouth.
‘He wasn’t so good at the emotional support bit though.’
‘Oh, who wants a dad who’s too tender anyway?’
Like Hektor, Sarah thought, heartlessly busting homes.
‘Rico liked Ambrose in the homework challenge round.’ She picked at some non-descript fingernail muck.
‘Hmm, he was fast at the maths problem, but solving it is one thing, helping your child to understand is another.’
‘Having It All is the thing for men now, just like it was for us twenty years ago.’
‘I’m looking forward to the Car Journey from Hell this week. Will Holly be taking part?’
‘What do you mean? How would she take part?’
‘Oh, you haven’t seen? You can use your webcam to be one of hundreds of small screens that’ll be in the back seat in the driving simulator. The dad in the front will be able to hear them all complaining and see them if he turns around, and see them in the mirror.’
‘First one to break, is it?’
‘Yes, I s’pose. Cruel really.’
‘Well, to earn the title…’
‘True enough.’
Fi stood and cast about her like she’d lost something. ‘I’d better get back.’
‘Sure, thanks for stopping by.’
Soon after seeing Fi off, it was time for Sarah to get Holly from accelerated nursery. She had a quick look in the back room before she left. It was squatting on the bean bag and pushing the foam bricks around the floor. It glanced briefly at Sarah as she opened the door. No issues. Sarah shut the door and went to the car.
There was a real hullabaloo at the nursery. Amelia Featherstone, a woman Sarah knew a bit and had always thought of as a person who looked like she was perpetually in receipt of a randomised bonus deduction. Featherstone was tearing a strip off Dr Ashaye, the accelerated nursery director. Dr Ashaye was doing her best.
‘Lead lined walls are actually the only totally reliable defence, Mrs Featherstone, and I really don’t think exposing these children to lead is in their best interest …’
‘But Eric’s chip! Look at him …’
‘I’m aware of the boy’s condition, Mrs Featherstone. Please bear in mind that even with lead-lining or somesuch, once the hackers have those basic details, they could strike at any time. We all have to be very wary of this information becoming public.’
‘Oh no, don’t put this on me. It happened here, how do we know your nursery wasn’t responsible for leaking our children’s data?’
There were uncomfortable murmurs from the gathered mothers and nannies.
Dr Ashaye addressed the crowd now. ‘That is not possible. Our firewall, as you know, is state of the art.’
The child in question, Eric, was slumped on the soft-landing tiles by the swing’s upright. He looked utterly glazed, like an empty cabinet. It was possible to overcome a chip-intrusion, if you were quick enough. You needed to plug in so was safe to come off the grid temporarily, and the broken connection could force the hackers to move on. Featherstone really needed to get him home to have a chance. But she was here arguing. People never have a contingency plan, thought Sarah. She was forever bemused at how badly organised other people were.
At this point in the confrontation, Featherstone’s friend and ally, whose name Sarah wasn’t sure of, Rene or Rianne or something, stepped forward and touched Amelia on the arm.
‘I have an idea.’ Everyone could hear this, but not the idea. They were to see it, however.
*
‘I think the authorities would call it, “having your cake and eating it”,’ Sarah said to Rico after he was back from work. Rico was a trader, just like everyone. With automated agriculture and manufacture, the products in question had become a near irrelevance, and besides, the best money was made in trading the derivatives of the derivatives rather than getting your hands dirty with exchange of calcites, taro, bioethanol, or whatever. A wealth creator, he and his kind would say.
Rico sipped from his glass of wine and regarded his wife.
‘So how long did the transition take?’
Sarah explained the two steps: the hormone-rebalancing injection to bring brain and body development up to speed – in the case of Featherstone’s kid, this wouldn’t take long as he was only three – and the brain chip transfer.
‘Amazing really, these DIY kits. It beeps when you’re at the right spot at the top of the neck, you just click fire and in it goes. Painless. Or so Amelia’s pal was saying after she came out of Dr Ashaye’s office. Shameless gossip, but I’m not complaining.’
‘And did you see the new kid?’
‘Yeah, Amelia brought him out pretty quick, Eric, or the former Eric, I suppose, trundling behind like a regular spare. Hell of a day for him, not that he’d know, what with chip coming out.’
‘Same tool for chip removal and insertion?’ Rico asked.
What was it with him and the technical details? Sarah wondered. He couldn’t fix a squeaking hinge, let alone anything else.
‘Yup.’
Rico stood up and stretched. ‘Huh,’ he said, finishing the conversation. ‘I’m gonna watch Father of the Year.’
Sarah could see her husband from the kitchen as he wafted through the channels from the sofa to find this week’s Father of the Year episode. He had left his glass of wine on the counter – Rico showed little interest in drinking these days, preferring to dull his mind with TV instead.
The presenter was explaining this week’s twist, which Fi had spoken about earlier. Rico grunted with pleasure at the idea and turned to look at Sarah.
‘I’m gonna get Holly,’ he said, boyish and excited.
With his daughter stationed directly opposite the webcam atop the TV and appropriately briefed, Rico opened a connection to the show. He selected Daniel to irritate from his virtual backseat.
‘That guy is so smug,’ he said to no-one in particular.
While contenders were in the driving seat of the simulator, the screen was split so viewers could watch the backseat antics too – and of course, check whether they got on. Holly, directed by Rico, was having no luck.
‘This is ridiculous,’ he muttered. ‘Wait there,’ he said to Holly.
Sarah listened, still in position at the kitchen counter and armed with her glass of wine, as her husband went to the back room and opened the door. He hadn’t really looked at the spare, as far as Sarah knew, since it was old enough to shut away – about twenty months, typically. Sarah had to feed it, of course, and keep up-to-date with the injections. She sometimes took it out into the garden for a little runaround, but only when she was sure no neighbours would notice. You didn’t want a reputation for sentimentality about these things.
‘Molly, come over here,’ he said, like he was cajoling a dog.
‘It’s Polly,’ called Sarah. ‘You chose it! I was too dosed up, remember?’
‘So I did, now. Huh. Polly, come to me.’
Next, Sarah heard some clattering as Rico stepped in to pick up the spare. He walked back through to the lounge with it under his arm at the hip like a slippery rugby ball. He was grinning at his own mischievous inspiration.
Plopping it down on the sofa beside Holly, Rico checked the webcam feed and restarted his connection to the show. Polly stared docily around, her infantile eyes coming to rest on Holly.
‘Dad, it’s looking at me,’ she whined.
‘Just keep doing what you were doing, Hol,’ said Rico. He stared at the dozens of small screens that poor Daniel would see on his back seat, all screeching and groaning about how far it is, being bored, hungry, thirsty, desperate for the toilet and on and on.
Then he yelped, ‘Yes! We’re on!’
Sure enough, one of the many small screens showed Holly shouting and gesticulating, with her spare gazing at her. The show’s set up included a commentator and panel of pundits, like a sports match. Now, the commentator declared, ‘My God, is that a spare?’ Holly and Polly’s screen expanded to fill their whole side of the split screen. Sarah watched Daniel’s face. It was mapped with lines of confusion, shock and more than a little disgust. He turned in his simulator seat and promptly crashed the virtual car into a fence, and, with hokey light relief, a cartoon farmer came running towards his windscreen video feed, brandishing a crook.
The event was talk of the show thereafter, other contenders’ driving attempts somewhat overshadowed. Rico was thrilled. He kept pacing back and forth behind and in front of the sofa, ruffling Holly’s hair as he went by her each time. Sarah stepped forward after a bit and squirrelled the spare away in the back room. For once, it stood in the middle of the room until Sarah left and closed the door, rather than immediately settling down among the bean bags and soft blocks. Sarah felt a dull thud of vague anxiety settling in.
And for good reason.
The next morning, getting there in good time so Rico was still in the house, Population Services came by. The family was under suspicion for having, or at least behaving like they had, two children, rather than one plus a spare.
The woman snooped around the house, checking the spare’s storage area and looking, Sarah supposed, for evidence that the spare was more a part of their lives than it should be. The man addressed the family in the breakfast room. He gave a sermon on the continued need to keep the population in terminal decline, hence the one-child policy, for the sake of balancing the books, figuratively and literally, and the priviledge of the spare heir in this perilous world, whose role should be only that, and the dangers of forming a parent-child relationship, because of the revocation of the right to a spare at one’s child’s reaching reproductive age, but they knew all that didn’t they. Sarah listened blandly, watching her husband trying to chip in with his side. The man paid him no mind. He looked overworked, and undervalued, like most in what was left of the public sector. His face had begun its slide into bags and jowls.
When the woman returned from her inspection, the man said to Rico: ‘You and your daughter need to come with us for some questions.’
Abruptly, Sarah was alone in the house with the spare. She phoned the nursery and said Holly was sick.
‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ People asked this much more than they used to. They meant, ‘infectious’.
‘No, don’t worry.’
In a half-daze, Sarah went to the back room, knelt down, and put her arms around Polly, squeezing her until her daugher’s subhuman twin mewed a little.
Afternoon came without Rico and Holly’s return. Sarah had done little. She had phoned Fi, drunk coffee, watered plants. A visitor came around four: Hektor. Despite everything, Sarah had a shudder of excitement as she let him in. Hektor: tall, blonde, cut from the cloth of King David.
‘Are you alone?’ he asked, grimly, like a police detective, not the salacious lover she wanted.
‘Yes. Well, me and the spare.’ She had no idea why she mentioned that. Accordingly, Hektor looked at her blankly.
‘Why would you mention … never mind. Good. I left work early to come here.’
He was restless, like a child on a long journey. Sarah put her hand on his forearm, but he jerked away; all contact felt illicit, once you’d broken your vows.
So early, Sarah could tell her fantasy was giving way, and had already begun resigning herself to the embellishments needed for telling the tale over coffee or cocktails as she envisaged. She felt she had heard it all before, in TV shows and airport novels, as he explained why it was over, couldn’t happen again and on and on. Sarah let the situation infuse her brain, like his words were a sprinkling of tea leaves into a pot.
When he’d finished, Sarah realised her eyes were closed.
‘Sarah?’
‘The authorities are holding Rico and Holly for questioning.’
‘Jesus Sarah. Why didn’t you say?’ He said it in that way that makes it sound like not immediately mentioning the problem was a greater concern than the problem itself – people do it all the time, listen out for it. ‘Why?’
‘Did you see Father of the Year?’
‘No, but Fi said Holly was on … and her spare.’ Realisation slotted in for Hektor.
‘Jesus. What … can I do anything?’ Forever the decent guy.
‘No. Just go. Tell Fi we’ll be fine.’
Hektor did as he was told.
Eventually – it was going on midnight – Rico and Holly returned. Rico sighed onto the sofa, his feet hanging over the armrest. Sarah stood at the end, looking down at him.
‘I think … it will be fine,’ he breathed.
Things went somewhat back to normal after that. At the nursery, Featherstone’s spare had become a near-perfect Eric: the succession complete. Everyone stopped talking about chip-hacks, for now. The news kept the population figures rolling on the tape.
‘Still falling nicely,’ purred the newscasters. Rico was disappointed when Ambrose missed out in the final of Father of the Year to Stefan, who won the sympathy vote because both his child, then his spare, had died of the same infection. ‘There’s just something weird about a guy without any kids entering a Father of the Year contest,’ said Sarah.
Rico was subjected to a randomised bonus deduction when his payout came through, but he rolled the dice and got away with just a 54% tax.
One evening, she drinking, he not, she said: ‘It’s been so stressful. Let’s get away this weekend.’ Rico begrudgingly agreed and they trudged to the Isle of Wight. On the beach, Holly slipped in and out of the waves while her spare squeezed wet clods of sand in her fists. Rico escaped into infanthood, building sandcastles and diving into the surf. Sarah read the posters taped up along the sea wall. They were wanted posters, as though they had come to a blustery wild west. There was a poor photo of a grizzled face. He was wanted for sub-murder: the unlawful revocation of the right to a spare heir, a right which had to be revoked once the child got to sixteen anyway. No doubt it was a cut-rate service, for those too squeamish to do it themselves or too tight to see a licensed provider. Sarah looked at Polly and her stomach turned.
Rico waded up to her through the sand.
‘Holly wants to go see the Needles.’
‘Alright.’

On the headland, Sarah had a dim recollection that she’d seen a photo of these rock pillars, and there were three, but here were two. She squinted as though the missing one might resolve itself. She looked at her family, spread along the rail, sheer banks falling away below them, before cliffs that jammed into the water. Sarah heard the persistent voice in her head, but couldn’t decide whether to vault the rail herself, or tip over Rico, Holly, or the goddamn spare.